College News

Studying the Summer Abroad

07/30/2013

For college students, summers are typically reserved for working to build their bank accounts back up, relaxing, catching up with friends and family from home, and mentally preparing for the next academic year. But, several Fisher students, including Deepika Sivakumar, took advantage of one of the many summer study-abroad programs offered by the College.

Sivakumar, a junior biology major who is minoring in Spanish for the Health Professions and foreign language, traveled to Italy with six fellow Fisher students in the Fisher in Italy program, studying in Florence this summer. The group returned home on July 3.

“It has always been a dream of mine to go to Italy, so when I had the opportunity to choose a study-abroad destination, Italy was definitely at the top of my list,” said Sivakumar.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

She said her interest in Italy sparked in high school when she took a World Culture/Literature class that included a sub-unit on Art History. And she’s always loved traveling and learning new languages.

The group took a four-hour Italian course at the Instituto Italiano as well as a course with Dr. Caterina Shahbaz, Program Director of Fisher in Italy and former French professor at the College. Many times, she would take the group out of the classroom to visit the many monuments and learn the history behind them. Sivakumar said the culture course she took while abroad was very different from any course she has taken at Fisher, but that the language course was very similar.

She credits Shahbaz with the “unbelievable amount of sightseeing” she was able to fit in, and said her two favorite stops included a Gondola ride in Venice and a hike and swim in Cinque Terre. And she was also struck by the Vatican, in particular, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo.

“Now that I experienced classes at another school, I am excited to take Spanish for the Health Professions classes. It will be great learning medical terms in Spanish, as I hope to travel to Buenos Aires and provide medical service one summer in the future,” she said.